Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Friday October 09, 2009 @03:22PM
from the facebook-jealousy dept.

alphadogg writes to mention that at their "Open Hack Day" conference today and tomorrow, Yahoo plans on opening the floodgates to their homepage in hopes that developers will start building massive numbers of applications for general distribution. "Announced in April 2008, YOS [Yahoo's Open Strategy] aims to open all of the company's online services, sites and applications to third-party developers, as well as give end users a 'social profile' dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services. Swinging wide open the doors of Yahoo.com to external developers is a big milestone in this ambitious effort. Until now, Yahoo has erred on the conservative side when it comes to allowing tightly-integrated applications for its home page, opting to work individually with hand-picked partners."

And Yahoo is lame. They added sigfiles to my emails a full year after the world cup offering some sort of competition to win tickets for...the world cup. I emailed them and didn't get a reply. They just don't get it.

I've often wondered who actually uses Yahoo. People who don't know/care just use what's in the browser search bar (Google 9 times out of 10), and people who do care use Bing. Wait, no, they use Google too.
Then there's my grandfather who still uses AOL, but I wouldn't want them to lose 5% of their marketshare by having him switch.

Yahoo is used as a gigantic portal, "Internet utility" and some kind of communication platform. They were never a good search engine, their hopes went away as early as DEC got Altavista.com up. Inktomi gave them some band aid but they finally figured it is a good corporate search engine, not something to race with Google.

While Internet was small, their directory was good, that is all. In fact, this is what Yahoo was, originally: http://dir.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] . People tend to forget that for some period of time, they completely gave up "search" and used Google backend. They are switching to Bing now which interestingly surprises people.

Google is the clear "lets do a portal like them" wannabe(!) guy here, their iGoogle isn't at My.Yahoo of 1999 level yet. They also deal with a huge problem as even Joe Sixpacks started to say "enough with your leech of my data" to them. That was never a problem with Yahoo.

You should travel to Asia, especially Japan and Hong Kong to see their real power.

AT&T consumer grade internet customers get an email address "Powered by Yahoo" and are directed to the My Yahoo portal page when they install the starter kit that comes with the service. How many of those consumers do you think even know they can change it? Let alone actually want to mess with it.

Japan uses Yahoo. Massively. In fact it wasn't that long ago that I would get blank stares from people when mentioning google, and having to substitute yahoo instead... more recently people at least know what you are talking about, even if they aren't using it. Part of the reason for this is that they achieved huge brand recognition (if not much profit) when their subsidiary company Yahoo!Broadband did a pretty massive campaign to gain subscribers, giving away routers outside train stations, offering free three month connections and so on. (They are also tied into Softbank, one of the larger mobile phone companies here.)

E-bay is another pretty unheard of site, while Yahoo! auctions alone would probably keep the company afloat on its own over here. They are heavily used as a portal site and the usual first stop for people wanting to buy plane tickets or check the weather. For many people I think Yahoo is actually thought of as "the internet" and don't seem likely to go anywhere soon...

I hope you are karma whoring with such lame post which is guaranteed (somehow) to get "score".

Do you have a clue about the real web, the web companies/people really care about? Check table 3 at http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=366591 [comscore.com] . You will see Yahoo is still around, at second place after Google with 146 freaking million unique visitors. Can you render that number in your brain? 146 million unique visitors on Yahoo properties and they open their main property to developers.

So it's a bit like the Facebook platform only less social, fewer eyes, and years late? I know that's being awfully critical, but c'mon... Yahoo! has had the day-late, dollar-short affliction for a long time now.

No kidding. This is more like trying to use a defibrillator on a heart attack victim who's been dead for a couple days.

Yahoo has spent years flipping the bird to third party developers, whether open-source or closed, and now zombie-Yahoo is trying to attract third-party devs. While I welcome the move despite its being terminally late, I don't think it's going to save them. Five or six years ago, this would have been big. Ten years ago, this would have been world-changing. I like Yahoo, I really do. I prefe

So it's a bit like the Facebook platform only less social, fewer eyes, and years late?

Well, the good news is, at least it's ugly as fuck.

Seriously, I went to my yahoo mail today (yes, I use it, and I prefer it to gmail) and not only was all this shit on by default (quick! options -> mail options -> uncheck "Enable Connection-related features") but its styling came straight out of 1996. If you're going to jump on social networking this late, at least make it look like all the other Web-2.0 sites currently out there.

will they be open sourcing anything? will they stop using windows only codecs and standards? will that message "your platform is unsupported" go away when i login to my mail under linux? will their search engine actually return hits for things im actually looking for? If they use open standards their technology would work on every platform and they would actually save money in the long term IT only makes sense since their company was built on top of opensource

I actually use Yahoo. Seriously. It is my main messenger and I get the vast majority of my sports news from it and in fact like a number of their journalists/bloggers. I am actually very pleased with Yahoo opening up their stuff. Their compatability with 3rd party messengers SUCKS and having some more stuff that works with KDE's social desktop would be A-OK with me.

This is a problem with all proprietary instant messaging services. Which is why I still use IRC. All features are documented, so if you want to interoperate, you can. There is a plethora of clients to choose from. And you can actually chat with people on the large IM networks, too (through BitlBee [bitlbee.org]).

I hope they open up their IM infrastructure. It's really annoying when they change (read: break) stuff in the protocol and pidgin has to play catch up. Pidgin usually does catch up after 1 or 2 days but i still see lingering issues with logging into YM after the last major change yahoo made. Also it would be nice to finally have YM voice and video support in linux and BSD. Better yet, they could release an up-to-date, GPL'ed yahoo messenger for linux and i wouldn't mind switching to that. I hate to admit it